And finally, she laughed. “No-o-o-o-o,” she said. “That definitely never occurred to me.”

Art about solutions

Rick Lowe, Row Houses' founder, grew up in Alabama, the son of sharecroppers. He decided in college that he wanted to be an artist, and moved to Houston in the mid-'80s. His art was big — billboard-size, sometimes — and concerned itself with subjects such as the Ku Klux Klan.

In 1990, a group of high school kids came to tour his studio. One of the kids said that sure, Lowe's work reflected problems in his community — but that it wasn't what the community needed. The community already knew about its problems. What it needed were solutions.

That comment got under Lowe's skin. And a few years later, Project Row Houses was born: a “social sculpture,” an artwork whose medium isn't clay or paint, but a neighborhood and its people.

With grant money, the fledgling organization bought 22 little wooden houses in a section of Holman Street previously ruled by drugs and prostitutes. Those row houses — or, as they're sometimes called, shotgun houses — had been built in the '30s, as rentals. Lowe had seen those houses in the murals of one of his heroes, John Biggers, who in the '50s dignified the everyday lives of Houston's African-Americans by painting them on a grand scale.

But Lowe had another artistic forebear in mind, too: Joseph Beuys, a German artist who contended that the whole world was an artwork, a “social sculpture,” to which every human being contributes.

To illustrate the principle, Beuys made a giant pile of basalt stones in Kassel, Germany, and directed volunteers to take a stone somewhere and plant an oak tree at that spot. It's said that 7,000 of those oaks now dot the city.

Art, Beuys contended, could transform the world. Lowe set out to transform a neighborhood — to celebrate its history, to help its people, to turn a weedy, dangerous place into something proud.

Blurry boundaries

When Project Row Houses opened in 1994, some of those little white houses held art exhibitions. Others served as homes for teenage mothers trying to get their lives back on track.

Since then, the “campus” has grown from a block and a half to six blocks, from 22 houses to 40 properties. The Young Mothers Residential Program still occupies seven of the houses; now there's a playground behind them. Some of the houses still offer art exhibitions. Some house resident artists. In one park dozens of eyeballs seem to grow on stalks: It's a Bert Long sculpture called Field of Vision.

There's the Eldorado Ballroom, a renovated space where big-name acts such as Ray Charles and B.B. King used to play. There are Victorian-era shotgun houses, moved to their sites from other parts of the city when new development claimed another historically African-American neighborhood. And there are whole blocks of new low-income housing, based on designs by the Rice Building Workshop.

Driving around, this writer found it's hard to tell where the Row Houses campus begins and ends.

That's part accident: Hurricane Ike was hell on the signage, and Shearer intends to repair it. But in part, those blurry boundaries fit with Lowe's philosophy. He doesn't think there should be a sharp line dividing art and life.

He likes the way that Row Houses' effect spills out of its campus, into the surrounding neighborhood. Kids attend its after-school and summer programs at schools and in a nearby church. The Project Row Houses Community Development Corp. — now its own freestanding entity — builds low-income housing in the neighborhood. Nearby, there's Workshop Houston, which got its start as a free bike-repair shop on Project Row Houses' space. Now in its own building, Workshop's arty, laid-back staffers teach the neighborhood kids skills including welding, beat-mixing and algebra.

But if everything is art, how does an art organization define itself? For the past couple of years, Row Houses' board has been asking itself tough questions, trying to figure out how the organizations should grow up.

Could this most site-specific of artworks expand to other parts of the city? Or to other parts of the country? How can it do the most good in the Third Ward? And in the whole world?

The key, Lowe says, is to focus more tightly on what Row Houses does best: art. To do things such as counseling or work force development, the group hopes either to recruit partners or incubate new organizations.

But Lowe's definition of art — like Shearer's, like Beuys' — remains expansive. That laundromat? It's an idea of Lowe's; he recently exhibited sketches of it at the CAMH.

Cookie Love, he explains, is a big, sweet woman that he met at a Third Ward laundromat. Love makes money by doing other people's laundry, and he sees her in the neighborhood, pushing a cart loaded with big plastic bags full of clothes, to and from the laundromat. But the neighborhood's run-down laundromats are being shuttered, one by one, and Lowe worries that soon, she won't have anywhere to work.

The art? Lowe envisions “Cookie Love's Wash 'n' Fold,” an actual laundromat, a nice clean one, that celebrates a real person, a real life, a real part of the Third Ward.

Love, like the rundown row houses he once saved, deserves the attention that art demands.